Above the law

There’s that guy again, crying that “the top Leadership and Investigators of the FBI and the Justice Department have politicized the sacred investigative process” to try and frame him for a crime he didn’t do.

And there’s that guy, crying about the latest lying witness he says a shady federal prosecutor is using to lie about him: “this man did a lot (of) bad things in a lot of places. I’m someone who never did, never would be involved in such an effort. . . . What I’m saying, you know, to how plea bargains work and how prosecution works, one thing or another — I’m saying to you it did not happen.”

Actually, those were two very different guys in two very different positions — the American President who may be on the legal hook now and the New York City mayor who’s already wriggled off of it. The potential crimes they’re tied to are very different and Bill de Blasio never had the power to fire his prosecutor, but he sure sounds a lot like Widdle Donald.

Here was our mayor Wednesday, answering reporters’ questions about the news that a second person, restaurateur Harendra Singh, had pleaded guilty to bribing him.

“Got nothing more to say on it. . . . I really have nothing else to say. . . . Again, I have nothing else to say on it. . . . The federal government looked at this exhaustively. I’ve got nothing else to say about it. We handled things in the appropriate manner. Okay, new topics. . . . I am not a lawyer, I don’t know . . . I’ve got nothing more to say about it.”

Singh is expected to have plenty to say as the star witness at the upcoming corruption trial of former Nassau County Executive Tom Mangano, a Republican. As de Blasio was in Manhattan shutting down reporters on Wednesday, Mangano’s lawyer was in a Long Island court house claiming selective prosecution, since the feds last year announced that they wouldn’t charge de Blasio for bribe-taking.

That won’t fly, since Mangano is accused of pocketing his gifts, while de Blasio’s went into the political operation that helped make him mayor with control of what he projected this week will be a $88.7 billion budget that leaves millions in loose public change to pay back the friends who paid him.

In a functioning democracy, it shouldn’t matter whether or not a public official who uses his office to reward donors personally profits from the bribes he collects from them. In America now, that’s the difference between prison and power thanks to the same terrible 2016 Supreme Court decision that all but legalized corruption unless a public official is both greedy and sloppy enough to flat-out say “I will do this official act in exchange for those dollars,” and that forced prosecutors to let de Blasio walk away with just a public scolding from the case they’d been building against him.

That same decision is why former State Senate leader Dean Skelos and former Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver both had their corruption convictions overturned. And why the feds last week dropped their case against U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez of New Jersey for his private plane flights to the Dominican Republic along with a wealthy old patron and that patron’s barely legal girlfriends.

De Blasio, Silver and Menendez are all Democrats, and the U.S. Attorneys pursuing them had all been appointed by Barack Obama — something to keep in mind as Trump raves about some supposed secret society of G-Men trying to railroad him on behalf of those damn Dems.

In a Trump-ian sense, though, de Blasio is right. He beat the rap, and then won reelection.

A month after that, de Blasio collected nearly $20,000 in funds for the race he’d already won from Reuven Kaufman — who runs the trade association for the Diamond Dealers Club, which has an office in the World Diamond Tower just down the block from Jared Kushner’s 666 5th Ave. — and his family.

“I just feel he is doing a good job and I just wanted to show my appreciation for what he is doing for the city,” Kaufman told The News’ Reuven Blau and James Fanelli.

Coincidentally, the other felon who pleaded guilty to bribing our mayor, Jona Rechnitz — the guy who showed up in an elf costume to home-deliver Christmas bribes to the wives of the same NYPD top cops he was treating to private flights to the Super Bowl with prostitutes on board — also has an office in the Diamond Tower.

And among the people who gave Rechnitz money to deliver to de Blasio was yet another Diamond Tower tenant, Chana Weisz, the wife of Moshe Lax, Ivanka Trump’s longtime friend (he’s who first introduced her to Jared) and former business partner in Ivanka Trump Fine Jewelry.

I’m not saying that those donors, other than Rechnitz, did anything wrong. I’m not saying that de Blasio is Trump.